Humans Stealing Jobs From Machines

A major theme of Tyler Cowen's 2013 book "Average Is Over" is that humans working with smart machines are likely to perform better than humans or machines alone in a variety of contexts. This is a relatively optimistic take in a world where people are concerned that smart machines are going to take all or almost all of the jobs. I lean towards the more optimistic, and see lots of room for complementarity. While either path may come true in the end, it's not hard to look around and see examples of complementarity. And in fact, we can find examples where humans are stepping in to do jobs machines proved incapable of.

One of the most high profile recent cases is Facebook. From an outside perspective the story seems to be that they thought algorithms could do a lot of the moderation work, but it has turned out that they need humans more than they think to make judgment calls. Here is how Quartz is reporting it:

In May, as Facebook faced criticism that users were live streaming acts of violence, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced 3,000 new hires to curtail violence, hate speech, and child exploitation on the platform. At the time he said there were 4,500 people already working to moderate content, a function Facebook internally calls Community Operations. After a federal inquiry into Russia’s political advertising purchases on Facebook, the company announced 1,000 more hires to the team to focus on advertisements, in addition to 250 people that would work specifically on election interference.

That's 3,000 humans hired in May and another 1,000 coming to do a job that algorithms couldn't do. Poor machines, unable to compete with human judgment.

Maybe these are temporary jobs and in a few years Facebook will be able to rely entirely on algorithms. But hiring 1,000 people to judge advertisement is an example of algorithms unable to even judge things that humans are creating, let alone do the creating themselves. In other words, if machines cannot categorize marketing, how far are they from being able to replace humans in making it?